MS writes…. a good… software…. program? Whatthe…?
Okay. So Hotline provided me with Internet Explorer 5b1 long before it was released to the general Mac-using webpublic. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t surprised with the final release. From what I can tell so far this MS product is actually a worthwhile download. Just a few of its high and low points:
Good:
1. At only around 8MB is size, it’s even possible for the average 56k modem user to download within a reasonable time.
2. It seems that that pesky memory leak in the beta versions has mercifully vanished.
3. The fact that the Address Autocomplete is finally up to par with what Windows users have had for ages (and it’s even translucent! Wow! Just like Windows 2000 menus! Where do you suppose they got that idea?
4. That page holder is nifty for the intranet I use every day but don’t want as my start page.
5. The interface is all Aquafied and lined like an iMac. It’s actually a pretty good looking browser. You can even change the color. I don’t know why you would, though, because….
6. It autoselects its color to reflect the color of the computer it’s installed on… (I’ve only seen it automatically be blue on a blue and white G3 and graphite on a G4… If it can select the interface color to match the iMac it’s installed on, that would be interesting).
7. Again something Windows users have had: you can now have folders of links on your toolbar now, not just links. This is actually really handy… assuming you spend your time organizing your bookmarks.. which would, let’s face it, be more than a little pathetic.
8. For all you Flash developers out there, it seems that IE5 now FINALLY understands Javascript passed from within a .swf file. You have no idea how long I spent trying (and failing) to get standard popup windows to work in IE4.5.
Bad:
1. While it has a tighter rendering engine than any other Mac browser, I have had some problems with it selectively ignoring top and left margin=0 commands in my body tag. You hit reload, and it obeys, reload again, and it’s back to faulty code rendering.. not something I’m too happy about.
2. It has a fondness for ignoring the bold tag… That’s not too cool either.
That’s about it. Only a couple problems.. (although it’s taken my system down a couple of times… might be an extension thing.. I’m still figuring that out. And I’ve had a few suspicious Error Type 11 failures with not IE, but other applications that NEVEr crash. Like SimpleText.). Those problem are pretty annoying, though. We’ll see if MS can get a patch out relatively quickly (ha!).